Hard running Spins

Friday afternoon meant another session with my trainer, and another reason I don’t put a whole lot of weight on individual training sessions. Dogs just like people have off days, and have days when they’re in the zone. That’s where Mia was Friday. The week before I couldn’t get her to do much of anything but this time out she was she was running hard, on point, and doing a terrific job of retrieving.

Elettra was her steady old self – running hard, searching well, and doing a decent job of pointing although I’d liked her to have been more steady. However one thing I found out with my Spins is that they don’t take pigeons as seriously as game birds, so she’ll do well on partridge or quail.

As for Doc, my trainer just wanted him on birds; rather than working with his pointing, we let him chase, catch and play with the pigeons. He’s still a little intimidated by the live ones but he’s solid on point and give him a dead bird, he’ll retrieve it like nobody’s business. What we’re doing now is just building his confidence with live birds.

We took a few pictures of the guys training which I’ll be posting once I get them back and downloaded, so stay tuned.

2 Responses to “Hard running Spins”

Allowing young ones to chase birds is a good way to get them over being intimidated by the ones that are not dead. Believe it or not I have seen master level dogs pull up on live birds. They probably needed a bit more of what you are doing with Doc now when they were pups. Or more hunting. 🙂

Thanks. One thing I’ve noticed is that, at least with me, hunting gives their confidence a tremendous boost even though their technique suffers a little in the process. But like everyone else, they have their good days and bad days.